Abstract
How can literature contribute to the study of law? This question, which lies at the heart of the ‘law and literature’ enterprise, has generated some of the most creative interdisciplinary scholarship in recent years. Desmond Manderson’s Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law is a valuable addition to this burgeoning area of inquiry. His analysis is premised on an imaginative, patient, and sustained reading of a single novel by David Herbert Lawrence, the Kangaroo referred to in the title of Manderson’s book.
The choice of a DH Lawrence novel as the entry point into a discussion of law and literature seems eminently sensible, and at the same time, the focus on Kangaroo is a pleasantly surprising one. Lawrence’s work has long courted legal controversy. In 1929, the police raided an exhibition of his paintings at the Warren Gallery in London, after members of the public complained about their explicit eroticism and even perversity. Thirteen pieces of artwork were confiscated, and Lawrence only managed to regain possession of them with the promise that he would never exhibit them in England again. There is also the trial of Penguin Books for the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; the court case constituted a major public event when it took place in 1960 and remains a key moment in literary history. Penguin had to show that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was of sufficient literary merit in order for its publication to come under the ‘public good’ defense of the Obscene Publications Act, and much of the cross-examination revolved around what it meant for a piece of writing to be considered as literature. The great and the good of the literary world, including EM Forster, Richard Hoggart, Rebecca West, and Walter Allen, lined up to testify to the artistic value of the novel, and the jury eventually returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’. To date, the legally inflected scholarship on Lawrence has tended to return to these episodes, while the jurisprudential significance of his wider corpus has remained largely unexplored. By staging an encounter between legal theory and a novel that at first glance seems to have little to do with law, Kangaroo Courts does much more than further our understanding of the legal context of Lawrence’s work. It inaugurates a new way of ‘doing’ law and literature.
Manderson’s book begins by situating Kangaroo in the context of the crisis of modernity. The early decades of the 20th century were marked by widespread anxiety and even disillusionment; the First World War destroyed much of the basic structures of society, and the loss of life and property that came in its wake forced a reevaluation of people’s values and cultural attitudes. Moving deftly between art, music, and literature, Manderson shows how different cultural products responded to the trauma of war. For example, the form of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland seems to suggest that modern poetry can only be cobbled together with the shards and fragments of a literary heritage shattered into pieces by war, and the macabre, hallucinatory depictions of the battlefield in Otto Dix’s paintings can be read as challenging the established images of military heroism of the time. Manderson argues that in legal terms, the crisis of modernity had two dimensions: on the one hand, it was marked by a loss of faith in positivism, whose emphasis on rules, reasoning, and logic was increasingly regarded as restrictive and intellectually impoverished. On the other hand, the New Romantic vision of a superhuman, charismatic figure from beyond the law who would restore order and harmony was also problematic because it raised questions of legitimacy and accountability. In the aftermath of World War I, justice seemed to be found neither within the law nor beyond it. One of the central questions of Kangaroo Courts is how we can keep the rule of law amidst a crisis of modernity.
The originality of Manderson’s argument lies in the demonstration that the answer can be found in a work of fiction. The book takes great care to note that Kangaroo does not present the reader with a ready-made, easily digestible thesis about the rule of law. It argues that what the novel gives instead is the experience of justice. In other words, Kangaroo’s jurisprudential dimension lies not in any explicit statement about the law but in the experience of justice, which its reading (and writing) conveys. Manderson argues that while Lawrence’s novel ‘does not talk about justice—does not, indeed, mention it at all’, it does give a person ‘a literary experience of justice, which the author lived through writing the book, and which changed him as much as it changed his readers’ (p. 6). This is, of course, a bold and even startling claim. In what way does a novel that does not explicitly thematize the law or depict legal actors and agents give the reader a literary experience of justice? The middle section of the book carefully, and compellingly, lays the groundwork for this argument. Chapters 6 and 7 explain the experiential dimension of a literary work by showing how Kangaroo ‘rewrote’ Lawrence. Through a detailed discussion of the historical and stylistic dimensions of the novel, Manderson shows that it is possible to trace how Lawrence’s own ideas changed. Manderson points out that in the original version of the text, Lawrence had been much more heavily influenced by New Romanticism and had planned for Richard Lovatt Somers, the protagonist, to be a revolutionary leader. However, he later changed his mind and completely rewrote the plot. Novel writing is an experiential process, through which the author experiences changes to his ideas and to his self. Manderson further points out that the experience of reconsideration, reflection, and change is embodied in the text itself, through the unfolding metaphors of landscape, the interrogation of stable, unitary selfhood, the opaque modernist language, as well as through the polyvocality and irony, which constantly throw into question entrenched perspectives or ways of thinking. The form of the novel ensures that literature has an important experiential dimension to it: one cannot simply ask what Kangaroo is about but must also be attuned to how a reading experience is constituted through an encounter with it.
The key term in Manderson’s argument is ‘polarity’. This notion is most explicitly articulated in Chapter 8 and is developed from that point until the end of the book. Polarity is characterized by movement, contradiction, and productive tension. It constitutes a perpetual state of to and fro, of forward and backward movement, and of exchange and modification. In Manderson’s words, a work marked by polarity ‘refuses either to choose between opposites or to harmonise or unify them. Instead, it preserves intact the constitutive and ineradicable fact of their contradiction’ (p. 136). Drawing on the work of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Manderson shows that Kangaroo embodies an experience of justice that goes beyond the expression of any single position. Instead, the novel’s inherent plurality – its multiple voices, its juxtaposition of different viewpoints, its subtle irony – leads to the recognition that the tension created by the existence of different positions can itself be a productive and powerful force. Justice, then, can be interpreted as a kind of ‘call and answer’ in which multiple positions are brought into dialogue. This view of justice is embodied in the distinctive Australian sound ‘coo-ee’. ‘Coo-ee’ is a sound of aboriginal origin and was used by wanderers in the wilderness who sought a response from people close by to help them find their way. It therefore encapsulates this process of to and fro, call and answer. No single position is suppressed at the expense of another, and justice exists precisely in the complex, ongoing, and at times difficult process of conversation negotiating between those positions. In this light, the rule of law can in turn be understood as ‘a set of ideas that institutionally protect the social and dialogic process of exposing and critiquing reasons for decision’ (p. 159). Like justice, the rule of law is premised on conversation and exchange; it ensures that those who have the power to make decisions listen to people who disagree with them and consider their point or view, and it ensures that we, as a society, understand our obligation to scrutinize and to challenge the reasons and arguments of those who make decisions. As such, the rule of law does not stem from any solid, unequivocal foundation, as some theorists would have us believe, but constitutes a process that continuously puts into question any justification or reasoning presenting itself as a foundation in the first place.
Kangaroo Courts ends where it begins: with a passage from Lawrence’s novel describing waves breaking on the shore. The book can be said to stem ultimately from this passage: the oscillation of the waves is a metaphor for the polarity that characterizes justice and the rule of law. Polarity is about opposition, different sides coming into contact, merging, mixing, separating, and then merging again, in a continuous process. The final chapter of the book, entitled ‘Littoral Readings’, opens up the analysis beyond Lawrence’s novel. One of the major achievements of Manderson’s book is that it presents not only a way of reading a novel jurisprudentially but a way of showing how such a reading is already inherent in the texture of literature itself: in its structure, its accommodation of contradiction and plurality, and its metaphors. Manderson notes that ‘Lawrence’s book is fiction, and that, as it happens, makes all the difference’ (p. 92). In other words, the distinctiveness of the language of fiction is an integral part of its jurisprudential significance. Manderson’s argument focuses on one single novel and rightly interprets it as a response to the crisis of modernity in the early 20th century, but it could perhaps be extended to the analysis of earlier fiction: Flaubert’s (1857) Madame Bovary constitutes a superb example of irony and multiple viewpoints, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works of course form the basis of much of Bakhtin’s (1984) analysis. The best works of interdisciplinary scholarship often extend beyond the boundaries of the texts that they analyze, and the potential new readings of other works of fiction which Kangaroo Courts gestures toward attest to the brilliance of its critical vision.